With more data to manage, administrators face increased cost and complexity in managing their storage environments. Those who want to pick and choose among best-of-breed storage hardware and storage resource management (SRM) applications generally must install multiple complete software stacks and train their staffs on each, only to end up with a set of applications that do not interoperate.
The mission of the Eclipse Aperi storage-management project is to make it easier to develop advanced storage-management applications. Building such applications requires a significant investment in developing the appropriate software infrastructure to support them. Aperi provides an open source infrastructure and representative set of applications that anyone can build on and use.
The Aperi project, created by industry-leading vendors such as CA, Emulex, Fujitsu, IBM, McData and Network Appliance, was formed to build a common, open source platform for managing all brands of storage systems to give users more flexibility and improved access to stored information. In August, the Eclipse Foundation formally accepted the Aperi framework as a storage-management project. Eclipse is an open source community focused on providing an extensible development platform and application frameworks for building software.
Today, Aperi continues to establish the framework and follow through on commitments such as the availability of the project road map, code donations and collaboration with the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA).
The Aperi platform will consist of four modular components:
* A server that contains core infrastructure features, including discovery, control and monitoring services for the entire storage environment, as well as the ability to execute scheduled activities and process notifications from agents.
* An optional host agent.
* The Aperi repository, a relational database responsible for storing and providing access to all the information discovered or generated by the Aperi platform.
* The Aperi user interface, a rich-client GUI written in Java that provides complete access to functions of the Aperi platform.
The Aperi management server can be divided into three layers. First, the core framework provides essential services to the rest of the architecture. These include logging, framework configuration, job scheduling, an SNMP protocol adaptor, a Common Information Model (CIM) protocol adaptor, a Fibre Channel protocol adapter, Web services and a database interface.
The second layer provides the building blocks geared to storage management. It performs device discovery throughout the storage environment and stores the discovered information in the Aperi repository. A monitoring service receives external notifications such as SNMP traps, Fibre Channel Generic Services-3 events and CIM indications, and includes a damping mechanism to resolve an event storm – when many notifications are received that pertain to the same underlying condition. The monitoring service also posts the external notifications to an event log.
The third layer provides application-level storage-management functions such as discovery, capacity reporting, alerting and control services for storage domains, such as host file system data, storage subsystems, storage fabric and tape drives. These application-level capabilities help storage administrators perform a variety of storage-management functions, and they serve as examples to developers of how to extend the Aperi framework to construct new functions.
With these core storage management functions and its modular design, the Aperi framework provides a common foundation upon which vendors and users can create innovative application extensions that would otherwise require costly investments in the underlying technology.
Aperi code is scheduled to be available next quarter. The technology’s support for key standards such as the SNIA Storage Management Interface Specification (SMI-S) provides greater flexibility and increased interoperability for users.
By providing a tested implementation of SMI-S, Aperi will extend the benefits of an industry-backed open source community. Administrators and developers will benefit from access to the vision, innovation and collaboration provided by the Eclipse Aperi storage-management platform.
Slupesky is the Eclipse Aperi project lead for IBM. He can be reached at slupesky@us.ibm.com.
